Ken Antonellis and John Hayes at Charles River RC have built these. I also copied the frying pan spool design when I built my retriever.
They work well, but I would make the following mods: 1) Make the rear spool plate as large as possible. This will discourage the line from jumping behind it and into the V-belt. My plate is over 12" diameter, and it could be bigger. 2) Use a large number of bolts to clamp the spool together. I used 18 bolts, 10-32, spaced uniformly on a circle which is as large as possible (just a bit smaller than the spool core disk). This was just barely adequate. The packed retriever line exerts tremendous bursting pressure, and without the closely-spaced bolts being adjacent to the wound up line, the soft cast-aluminum flying pan will deform outward like taffy. The LA plans show only the 3 U-bolts holding the spool together. This is OK for attaching the pulley, but it's grossly inadequate for clamping the spool together. RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
